TV News LIES

US Customs and Border Protection implemented a rule this week that will require airlines to disregard “X” sex markers on passports and input an “M” or “F” marker instead, sending those people with an “X” marker into panic.

“X” markers became available to US passport holders in 2022, in an effort to allow people with gender identities other than male and female to obtain more accurate travel documents.

Now, the new CBP rule has many people on social media and beyond worried that they will no longer be allowed to fly internationally.

“It’s a little bit too soon to say how this is going to practically work out,” said Andy Izenson, senior legal director at the Chosen Family Law Center.

Passports with “X” markers should still be considered valid travel documents; the US district court of Massachusetts issued an order in June ensuring that they would remain valid after the Trump administration attempted to ban them under executive order 14168, titled Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.

While the courts have continued to prevent the Trump administration from outright banning a third gender marker, this week’s rule can still serve to make the lives of trans and non-binary people more difficult, Izenson says.

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In early October, after 43 years behind bars for a murder he apparently did not commit, Subramanyam “Subu” Vedam was ordered released.

But a day later, before he had even set foot outside the Pennsylvania prison where he has lived for decades, Vedam was taken into ICE custody. Now Vedam, 64, is on the verge of being sent back to a country he last lived in as an infant.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement cited a 1988 deportation order for the murder conviction and a drug crime in justifying his detention and deportation. Vedam’s exoneration for murder did not clear his drug conviction.

His family members, including a niece, are devastated by the likelihood that they will lose Vedam yet again.

"All we want is for him to be home with us and to be able to move forward in life," Zoë Miller-Vedam told USA TODAY from her home in California.

Before releasing him, Israeli prison guards decided to give Naseem al-Radee a farewell gift. They bound his hands, placed him on the ground and beat him without mercy, saying goodbye the same way they had said hello: with their fists.

Radee’s first sight of Gaza in nearly two years was blurry; a boot to the eye left him with blurred vision two days later. Vision problems added to the laundry list of ailments he gained during his 22-month stay in an Israeli prison.

The 33-year-old government employee from Beit Lahiya was arrested by Israeli soldiers at a school-turned-displacement shelter in Gaza on 9 December 2023. He spent more than 22 months in captivity in Israeli detention centres – including 100 days in an underground cell – before being released alongside 1,700 other Palestinian detainees back to Gaza on Monday.

Like the other detainees released back to Gaza, Radee was never charged with a crime. And like many others, his detention was marked by torture, medical neglect and starvation at the hands of Israeli prison guards.

His description of his time in prison is part of what the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem says is a policy of abuse towards Palestinians detainees in Israeli prisons and detention centres.

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Israel must allow tents and caravans to immediately be delivered to the Gaza Strip, a United Nations expert says, as displaced Palestinians returning to the north of the bombarded territory have found their homes and neighbourhoods destroyed.

Balakrishnan Rajagopal, the UN special rapporteur on the right to adequate housing, said people are finding nothing but rubble in areas from which Israeli forces have withdrawn in northern Gaza.

“The psychological impacts and trauma are profound, and that’s what we are seeing right now as people are returning to northern Gaza,” he told Al Jazeera in an interview on Saturday.

The UN estimated that 92 percent of all residential buildings in Gaza have been damaged or destroyed since the war began, and hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestinians have been forced to live in tents and other makeshift shelters.Tens of thousands of Palestinians have been streaming back into Gaza’s north after Israeli forces pulled back on Friday as part of a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas to halt the two-year conflict.

Palestinians across the coastal enclave have welcomed the suspension of Israel’s bombardment, which has killed more than 67,700 people since October 2023 and plunged Gaza into a humanitarian crisis.

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The most popular and potentially unifying Palestinian leader — Marwan Barghouti — is not among the prisoners Israel intends to free in exchange for hostages held by Hamas under the new Gaza ceasefire deal.

Israel has also rejected freeing other high-profile prisoners whose release Hamas has long sought, though it was not immediately clear if a list of around 250 prisoners issued Friday on the Israeli government’s official website was final.

Senior Hamas official Mousa Abu Marzouk told the Al Jazeera TV network that the group insists on the release of Barghouti and other high-profile figures and that it was in discussions with mediators.

Israel views Barghouti as a terrorist leader. He is serving multiple life sentences after being convicted in 2004 in connection with attacks in Israel that killed five people.

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Israeli authorities said Monday they deported to Greece and Slovakia another 171 people detained for taking part in a Gaza-bound aid flotilla, including prominent Swedish activist Greta Thunberg.

Israel's foreign ministry posted on X that “the deportees were citizens of Greece, Italy, France, Ireland, Sweden, Poland, Germany, Bulgaria, Lithuania, Austria, Luxembourg, Finland, Denmark, Slovakia, Switzerland, Norway, the UK, Serbia, and the United States." The post included photos of Thunberg and other activists wearing white T-shirts and gray sweatpants.

Thunberg was among dozens of deportees to land in Athens, Greece, on Monday afternoon. Crowds of supporters gathered at the Eleftherios Venizelos international airport and chanted “Free free Palestine!” as activists disembarked.

“That this mission has to exist, it's a shame! It is a shame!" Thunberg told journalists and protesters shortly after arriving. “I could talk for a very, very long time about our mistreatment and abuses in our imprisonment, trust me, but that is not the story,” she added.

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